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I knew Hillary was going to lose

In fact, I posted the following here:

Hillary This Is What Must Be Done
1) Advertise where the Undecided voters are, not the High Information committed voters. I have seen a lot of Ads for Hillary on politico and similar sites. I have seen none on sites like "Publishers Clearing House" (PCH) which runs contests and sweepstakes and attracts a lot of low information voters or similar sites. However, I see a lot of Donald Trump ads on these sites.

2) Tell people WHY they should vote for you, in your ads. The "I'm with her" ads are useless in this light. You need to convince the uncommitted voter to vote for you. This must be done out of self-interest, not because it is a club that you want to belong and give money to. There is no reason why anyone should support you. Your ads should say "This is how Hillary can help make your life better." Link to a page which lists short statements of how she can improve life for the average person. (It can also include the sign-up sheet to join the campaign.)

3) Tell people that you recognize that they want change, but they want change in the right direction. Trump is an oligarch, and the people who advise him and his cabinet will be composed of oligarchs such as Carl Icahn, the ruthless "corporate raider" who engaged in asset stripping. Unlike Trump, some of your key advisors will be Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren and other progressives like them. You pledge to take unlimited money out of politics, through appointing justices to the Supreme Court who will overturn Citizen United. You will also end the revolving door between the public sector and private sector, with at least five years between employment in government and the companies they regulated, oversaw or they worked for.

4) That any conflict that lasts more than six (?) months will require a declaration of war. No more endless undeclared wars.

Is Elizabeth Warren is our strongest and best candidate?

First, a little about me, so you know where I am coming from. I am a 72-year-old white male who was an elected officer in a private sector labor union. I am also, like Elizabeth Warren, a former Republican.

The presidential campaign has just begun. Yet, we can already see the outline of the strategies the candidates will use. Trump has nothing positive to run on, so he will base his campaign on attacking his opponents.

We already see the false accusation of the “Ukraine scandal” against Joe Biden. It may be false, but so were the eMail and Benghazi scandals directed against Hillary Clinton. We must always remember that in politics, what is true is not as important as what people perceive to be true. During the Second World War, the United States Office of Strategic Services did a report on Hitler’s psychological approach to politics. This report also sheds some light on Trump’s style of politics. “Hitler’s primary rules were: never allow the public to cool off; never admit a fault or wrong; never leave room for alternatives; never accept blame; concentrate on one enemy at a time and blame him for everything that goes wrong; people will believe a big lie sooner than a little one; and if you repeat it frequently enough people will sooner or later believe it.” All Trump needs is a sliver of fact he can hang his story (lie) from and you will never hear the end.

Joe Biden is basing his campaign on being the most electable candidate. He says he can persuade Independents, disillusioned Republicans, and Trump Democrats to vote for him. Polls show some of these non-ideological voters will believe there is something to Trump’s story about Biden and his son. Biden will lose these voters. These are moderates who only desire a return to normalcy. They are the core of Biden’s strength which enables him to claim he is the most electable candidate. Trump will not stop focusing on the so-called “Ukraine scandal.” He will “repeat it frequently enough so that people will believe it.” The voters will become confused, they will not know who to believe, and give up. They have no taste for more scandal. They may not vote for Trump, but they will stay home and not vote.

This will reduce Biden to relying on the anti-Trump vote and the Democratic base. Trump’s scandal based attack will reduce the number of people voting for nice-guy Joe Biden as a person. The perception of honesty and integrity is one of Biden’s great strengths. Biden may still get enough votes to win based on the anti-Trump vote and the Democratic base. But these same voters would be available to any of our other candidates who do not scare voters away. Biden is no longer a strong candidate who can easily beat Trump since Biden is a weak campaigner. This is shown by his previous losing presidential campaigns. The people elected Joe Biden as VP, but not because of his own campaign. The people elected Obama as President and Joe was part of his team. Even now Biden’s greatest strength in the primary is his connection to Obama.

Against our other two major candidates, Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders, Trump will use the accusation they are Socialist. He will claim they will destroy the American economic system. This is the old “Devil you know is better than the Devil you don’t know” trick used to scare voters. There are many middle-class and lower-class voters who will fall for it. This includes the members of my union who are not deplorable, but are open to fear. Like most people, their primary concern is for their families and themselves. “It’s the economy, stupid” is something Trump used successfully once. He will try to use again as he sells his “we never had it better” story (lie).

This accusation of being a socialist is easy to make against Bernie Sanders. When asked, Bernie will always self-identify as a Democratic Socialist. Bernie should call himself a “Social Security Democrat” since he is not really a Socialist. He does not advocate that the workers will own the means of production. A lot of voters still associate the word Socialist with Soviet-style communism. Bernie is not a Soviet-style communist; he’s an FDR-style Social Democrat. He wants to upend existing power structures and change them so they benefit the many over the few. His goal is to make America more like Scandinavia. Yet, Bernie keeps shooting himself in the foot by stressing he is a Democratic Socialist.

Words are labels which are shortcuts to thoughts and emotions. It is based on these labels that many Americans think and react to. Trump knows this and is a master in labeling people. So Bernie would be a weak candidate because of the Socialist label. Many voters, especially older ones, will be scared away from him. Socialism as a concept may be popular with a lot of young Americans. They have grown up seeing the failure and inequality of modern American capitalism. But they do not know of the repression associated with the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR). But their parents do. Advocating for Socialism is a very risky way to try to win a general election. After Bernie’s heart attack, we will now also have the questions raised about Bernie’s health. Bernie Sanders would be a very weak candidate against Donald Trump.

Trump and the Republicans will label any of our candidate as a socialist. But some of our candidates will be more difficult to label this way. Elizabeth Warren is one of them. Warren has always said she believes in capitalism, and for most of her adult life, she was a Republican. She taught commercial law at Harvard Law School. She knows both the strength and the weakness of modern-day capitalism. We can make the case, Warren knows better than any other candidate (including Trump) what we need to repair our economy. She has many plans on how to fix it. The central theme of Warren’s campaign is fixing broken capitalism that has become corrupt and no longer works for everyone. These are not just words to her, the “Consumer Financial Protection Bureau” (CFPB) is her baby. Like FDR, she wants to save capitalism, not destroy it.

Her commitment to the average person is shown by her life and what she has fought for. She grew up in a lower-middle-class home and attended the school of hard knocks. The lessons this school taught her included her father becoming disabled by a heart attack when she was 12. The bank repossessed the family’s car, and her family almost lost their home to foreclosure. Warren knows what it is like to live on the edge and feel the pain of not knowing what tomorrow will bring. When she was 13, Warren started waiting tables at a restaurant to help her family. With a little luck, and a lot of hard work, she became one of the nation’s most influential professors of commercial law. Unlike Donald Trump, Elizabeth Warren never had a silver spoon in her mouth. She knows what it is like to be a regular average person. This will help to make her a strong candidate.

In 1996, at 47 years of age, Warren left the Republican party and became a Democrat. She entered the public arena because she saw the shortcomings in the law and how it hurt ordinary people. Elizabeth Warren explained the reason for her change of heart and party this way. She had been non-political and believed you should not live beyond what you can afford. One day, as a professor, they tasked her with writing a book on bankruptcy. When she began her research, she was a typical Republican. She believed that most people filing for bankruptcy were working the system or had been irresponsible in incurring debts. But after her research, she concluded that such abuse was rare and that the legal framework for bankruptcy was poorly designed. She saw that most people filing for bankruptcy closely resembled her own family, who struggled financially. They were not the irresponsible deadbeats, she had expected. The only deadbeats were people like Donald Trump who filed serial bankruptcies and walked away enriched. She described the way the research challenged her fundamental beliefs as “worse than disillusionment.” It was “like being shocked at a deep-down level.” She realized the Republican Party was no longer “principled in its conservative approach to economics and to markets. It is instead tilting the playing field in favor of big financial institutions and against middle-class American families.” Warren corrected her beliefs and changed her party. These are traits of a good President. She will always have an open mind and will learn and admit when she is mistaken.

Elizabeth Warren then became an activist. She lead the fight against a bank-sponsored bill that restricted access to bankruptcy for average people. Later Elizabeth was respected for her stances in favor of more stringent banking regulations after the 2007–08 financial crisis. She took the lead in creating the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) in 2010. Since 2011, the CFPB has received over 1.2 million consumer complaints about dealings with financial firms. The CFPB has returned more than $12 billion to 29 million people wronged by financial institutions. These include credit card companies and banks.

Warren worked for years as an advocate for the common person from outside the political world. But in 2012 she decided she could have a greater impact by becoming a part of the legislative process. Warren entered and won the U.S. Senate election in Massachusetts. She became the state’s first female Senator. Elizabeth Warren is not a career politician. After only eight years of impacting government from the legislature, she is ready to have a greater impact for the people. Therefore she is running for President. Her administrative experience in creating the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau along with her legislative experience will serve her and we, the people, well.

There is nothing in Elizabeth Warren’s history that opens her up to the charge of being a socialist. She is a moderate who wants to end the Corporatism which has corrupted and distorted Capitalism. There is a great deal that shows she will end the corruption and act as a real reformer for American Capitalism so that once again it works for everyone. Only this will make America great. So Elizabeth Warren is our strongest and best candidate.

As you can see I like Warren, but before I commit I want to hear the counter-arguments, both for and against. Thank you